Replies to post #100866 on Biotech Values

[biomaven0]

>Vanco generics

Interesting paper.

FWIW, these were Colombian generics - don't know if the same applied to US products.

Seems like Lilly lost an opportunity to effectively extend its monopoly by challenging the equivalence of these generics.

Here's the proposed explanation given in the paper:

Vancomycin had so many fermentation impurities that it was nicknamed "Mississippi Mud" 50 years ago (30). After several attempts, Eli Lilly developed a chromatographic purification method that led to a product with at least 92% factor B and less than 4% impurities (Vancocin CP). Such impurities, known as crystalline degradation products or CDP-1 (minor and major fractions) (25), explained the greater frequency of adverse reactions reported for generics elsewhere (36) and, we propose, the Eagle effect found here.